How Much Time and Money Could You Save with Cloud Computing?

Managing your own infrastructure isn’t an easy thing. You have to spend hours, days or weeks planning your specific needs, deploying the right hardware for your use cases (which you also have to pay for), and hiring a team to manage the hardware and operations. Making those types of projections or even “predictions” is kind of like gazing into a crystal ball at times. But what if your infrastructure needs change? Your business is hopefully growing and your infrastructure needs to match your success. Well, as you grow, you have to run through that whole process all over again. You have to plan, deploy and manage; and each of these tasks has a significant cost, not only from a monetary standpoint, but also in terms of project management, human capital and your sanity as a whole.

The main principle behind Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is to develop a simpler process to address your IT needs and ensure that it takes less time to plan, manage and deploy – saving you time and money in the end. The question isn’t, “Can cloud computing save you time or money?” because we all know the answer to that. Yes. Of course it can! The real question is, “How much time and money can you save with cloud computing?”

In order to find that answer, you need to have a clear understanding of the benefits of cloud computing and where the real savings come into play. I go over this in great detail in my white paper, Skydiving Through The Clouds. Below are some of the ways companies benefit from transitioning to cloud based infrastructure.

Economies of Scale – underutilization and misappropriated hardware become a thing of the past. The cloud enables compute, storage and RAM resources to be more efficiently managed, provisioned and scaled, all within a shared environment.

Cost Control – knowing exactly what you are using and how much that usage will cost you allows for a much stricter control over expenditures.

“Disposable IT” – companies have the ability to create, use and destroy infrastructure based on their business needs.

Burstable Workloads– scaling based on demand allows organizations to efficiently use infrastructure in a timely basis.

Some cloud providers, like GoGrid, also make very easy to determine what your total operating expenditure will be with cloud hosting calculators. Our tool gives estimated monthly costs based on your infrastructure needs and usage. Remember, GoGrid is “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™” so we can definitely help you plan out your cloud computing strategy and rollout in a way that is understandable and doable.

Now, I’d like to hear from you. If you are already using cloud infrastructure, how much time and money have you saved since the switch? How are you using the cloud to make your IT-rollouts more cost effective? If you’re still managing your own infrastructure, how much do you estimate you could save by switching to a cloud hosted solution?